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4 The “virtual reality” of colonial Turkestan: how Russian officials viewed and represented the participation of the local population in the 1916 revolt Oybek Mahmudov Introduction After establishing its rule in Central Asia, the Russian Empire created a complex bureaucratic administration to govern the conquered Turkestan krai. Most of the colonial officials were either barely or entirely unknown in wider colonial circles and Russian society. However, they included genuine “Turkestan experts”, some of whom became “public” experts (among others, V. N. Nalivkin
2 The exemption of peoples of Turkestan from universal military service as an antecedent to the 1916 revolt Tatiana Kotiukova In lieu of an introduction As a researcher I have long been preoccupied with the subject of “military service for the native population of Russian Turkestan”. After a year working in the Russian State Military History Archive, in 2010 I wrote a short article, which I submitted for publication to the aptly-named Military History Journal (Voenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal). The editor felt that the title of my article was terribly dull
-Japanese War and commanded the northern front of tsarist dispositions during World War I. It was from this last posting, in the summer of 1916, that he was reassigned to the theatre where he had first made his name. Appointed Governor- General of Turkestan, he was given the special task of putting down the 191 192 The Central Asian Revolt of 1916 wide-ranging local revolt against labour requisitioning for the tsarist army that year. He pursued this goal with a vigour that suggested his qualms about violence were long in the past: the actions of his punitive forces
The 1916 revolt was a key event in the history of Central Asia, and of the Russian Empire in the First World War. This volume is the first comprehensive reassessment of its causes, course and consequences in English for over sixty years. It draws together a new generation of leading historians from North America, Japan, Europe, Russia and Central Asia, working with Russian archival sources, oral narratives, poetry and song in Kazakh and Kyrgyz. These illuminate in unprecedented detail the origins and causes of the revolt, and the immense human suffering which it entailed. They also situate the revolt in a global perspective as part of a chain of rebellions and disturbances that shook the world’s empires, as they crumbled under the pressures of total war.
areas of Turkestan were concerned.5 There were no accurate estimates of the casualties and losses, and we can only rely on the figure given by Mirzo Quqonboy Abdukholiqzoda Samarqandiy, according to what people said 71 72 The Central Asian Revolt of 1916 at the time. He wrote that from 15,000 to 20,000 natives died in the district of Jizzakh alone,6 against eighty-three persons among the official local and Russian administration, in addition to the seventy Russian women and children taken prisoner.7 These figures would correspond at a maximum to 10 per cent of
. What can explain this variation? Within broader and longer conflicts, short-lived episodes of extreme violence could be limited to relatively small territories. This was the case with Przheval’sk district, an area of tsarist Turkestan bordering Xinjiang, where violence against the Slavic settlers during the 1916 uprising was by far the harshest. How to make sense of the temporally and spatially circumscribed “peaks” of violence? In order to provide convincing answers, our analysis needs to be conducted at different scales. On the one hand, we must be attentive to
, which suggests that their extermination or permanent exclusion was not the goal. I also suggest that the continued violence of the period after the October Revolution, while ostensibly driven by revolutionary politics, was in fact a continuation of the by then well-established pattern of retribution by European settlers –soldiers and vigilantes – against the “native” population. “Where Russian blood was shed” In September 1916 the newly appointed Turkestan Governor-General Alexei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin (1848–1924) issued a notorious order that all land “where
riots was the misunderstood order to call the natives to work in the rear of the army.4 A similar view, although from the position of blaming the tsarist Government, was taken by one of the first Soviet researchers of the revolt of 1916, the Kazakh communist Turar Rysqulov. He wrote: The mobilization of native workers for the rear work served only as a trigger for the revolt of the natives of Turkestan in 1916, and not its main cause. The most important reasons, … were precisely those deep economic and political contradictions that were created as a result of the
Turkestan from the seventeenth to the twentieth century”.2 Despite this, the 1916 revolt remains little-known and understudied in Anglophone and Francophone scholarship. While there is a rich legacy of Soviet-era publications on the revolt in Russian, these usually bear the strong ideological imprint of the period when they were produced. The post-Soviet period has seen a flowering of new scholarship from Central Asia itself, some of it in Central Asian languages. While much of this continues to use paradigms and terminology inherited from the Soviet period, and
analytical letter from 2 December 1907 to the Governor-General of Turkestan, N. I. Grodekov, the governor of Semirech’e, General V. I. Pokotilo, cautioned against imminent upheavals and uprisings in the colony that could be provoked by the increased numbers of Russian settlers: In general the result of all these illegal (nezakonnyi) and superficial enterprises could be the following: a) the Kirgiz [Kyrgyz and Kazakhs], who are already in a panic, and seeing that they are really being deported from their native nest, will begin to riot; b) tens of thousands of new